NEW CHOREOGRAPHIES FOR AN UP-DATED PRESENT
ARCO Noticias nº 25. Autumn 2002.
It is with enormous satisfaction that Manu Arregui (Santander, 1970) has sold the five copies of his "Coreografía para 5 travestis" ("Choreography for 5 Transvestites") video during his first appearance at ARCO. Though the Fair is certainly not an unbiased judge (perhaps even less so at present, when a dissident can take part in the Fair), it always represents a special triumph, a sign that things can actually change. And, in fact, things really are changing, at least in some sectors of new art. Manu Arregui belongs to the new generation of artists who see art as an instrument for transforming society, an apparatus that interacts and shares space with others, such as films, publicity, fashion, popular music, etc., a new art, albeit a mainly governmental one, that responds to new social and cultural environments marked by the development and proliferation of new technologies and clogged by an excess of information. For this reason, the most innovative male and female artists at present are constantly reconsidering the different categories of art and artists in order to avoid all confusion and make sure their messages reach their publics, thus preserving the social function of art (criticism and renovation). Manu Arregui is one of them and he produces all of his work with his modest PC, specialising himself in 3-D digital modelling, a field normally associated with video-games and the entertainment business in Hollywood, two crucial areas for ideological transmission to younger sectors. Furthermore, even before gaining the confidence of a gallery (he was recently signed up by the Espacio Mínimo Gallery in Madrid, one of our country's most interesting galleries), his works of art were already "hanging" in his magnificent Web site www.manuarregui.com, thus forming part of a network of alternative relationships that have sprung up around Internet in recent years.
As of the beginning of the year 2001, you can visit "Choreography for 5 Transvestites", a series of html files and flash technology that, after a welcoming, introductory page, divides itself into three sub-pages: "Photographs", "Videotape" and "Love". In "Photographs", the artist offers a selection of photographs taken from the video that form a photographic series. In "Videotape", the computer becomes a monitor and you can watch the video in its original, digital format. And, in "Love", the artist refers to the documentation containing references that have influenced his work: Esther Williams and her films about "schools for sirens", Aubrey Beardsley, Gilbert and George, Horst P. Horst, Herney Gearon, Pierre Moliner and Regina Relang. It is not surprising that the artist expresses manifest interest in explaining the artistic context surrounding his work since, in doing so, a significant interaction produces itself, thereby generating a passionate flow of construction of the senses. As happens in real life, the video images overlap historical memory and other sources with which we are being constantly and simultaneously bombarded. The series and video take on new meanings when we contemplate the photographs making up "Love" and these, in turn, are transformed when we watch the videotape.The three sub-pages deconstruct themselves individually to better construct the complex speech of multiple artists.
In his Website, Arregui states his intentions clearly: his intention to play with elements upon which our present society is based, with special reference to everything gay by using the love-hate relationship he maintains with the genres and artists responsible for laying the very foundations. By revisiting those we already consider as being masters, the artist gathers the messages that we have assimilated, forcing us to rethink them, and by contextualising them in the present, he aims to free himself from what he describes as self-destructive strategies: "we've been burdened by the weight of the obsessions of the great creators, making them ours, mitifying and copying self-destructive habits".
Naturally, what has functioned in the Art Fair has been the videotape that reached ARCO after the "Trans Sexual Express Budapest 2002" Exhibition after forming part of the "Art and Electricity" Project and being distributed in conjunction with NEO2, an underground alternative publication. The video-tape, whose main purpose is to confront the spectator with sexuality, represents a celebration of life, a black and white party similar in style to the first Hollywood musicals and structured according to the "now hide-now show" tandem that film language captures in what is in and what is out of focus. In time with the notes of "The Embassy Waltz" sung by "My Fair Lady's" Stanley Holloway, portraits of hands and legs appear, until they reveal the body they belong to, whenupon the camera focuses on the subject's genitals that, in the final apotheosis or "grand finale", urinate. We thus discover that what appears to be and what is not and that which is closer to what we appear to believe. Using this exercise, the artist manages to demolish our preconceptions about sex, gender and a naturalist sort of sexuality whilst simultaneously questioning sexuality and fetishism that are the subjects of the exercise by transforming the language that normally makes them up. Manu Arregui plays with these elements, arranging them to make a new choreography, his choreography for a show for a more plural present.
Xabier Arakistain.
